Learning Rust, week 5
By Kunal MehtaI'm skipped writing a post for week 4 and then didn't do any Rust related things for a week, so this is my week 5 update.
The main (published) Rust I've written since my last post is a port of my w.wiki statistics Toolforge tool. It reads through compressed plaintext dumps, parses URLs and aggregates counts per-domain to make a nice table. I used the flate2 crate for decompressing gzipped files and then the std::io::BufRead trait to read a file line-by-line.
It also has a slow-to-load chart that shows the increase in total shortened URLs since the start of the service. After looking through a few different plotting libraries, I ended up using plotters because it could properly chart timescale graphs. I think the graphs created by the charts crate look prettier but it wasn't flexible enough for this dataset. The chart is slow to load on Toolforge because it reads ~60 cache files, needing to hit NFS for each one.
I want to move the cache to redis, but the primary Rust redis library doesn't support having an automatic key prefix so I might end up writing a wrapper to do that.
In the future I want to provide charts for the individual domains and maybe a listing of recently shortened links for each domain, we'll see.
Because of how rocket's template system wants its structs to be serde-serializable, it becomes really straightforward to create a JSON API for every template-based endpoint. I had written a whole library (flask-dataapi) for this in Python, and now it's basically built-in.
I also submitted two OAuth2-related patches to Rust crates:
- mediawiki - Support authenticating with an OAuth2 access token
- rocket_oauth2 - Add Wikimedia as a provider
In terms of documentation, I've spent a decent amount of time improving my Rust on Toolforge wiki page, including some updates that came after debugging with other Rust users on IRC. I think it's in a state that we can link to it from the official Toolforge docs.